Disordered eating.

[Clearing out my drafts. This one is from 2018 if anyone can remember that far back. Not particularly library based. ]

Food is fuel. Food is energy. Food is life.

Foods are given moral values, formed more often than not out of pseudo-science and communicated with the residual power of religious language. Feelings of guilt and shame around food are causing us to harm ourselves through restrictive, obsessive thought and behaviour patterns around eating. Eating is something we have to do to live. Eating has become commodified and capitalised and confused and fraught.

There is a problem in the way we employ certain language to talk about food. I constantly hear people say something along the lines of, ‘I did x earlier, so I can eat this now’. Rather than ‘my body is constantly working in order to exist, it needs food so that it can continue doing so’ – with no other preconditions than being alive – you don’t need to be actively hungry, you do not need to consciously work out a reason to cancel out the food you consume. You’re allowed to eat food. It is one of the basic necessities of human existence. Everything eats. Is that why our culture tells us not to? Because we like to think of ourselves as distinguished from the rest of the natural world, and things like food, and sex, and a lot of the things our bodies naturally do, become these harshly contested sites of morality and this consistent notion of a need for ‘control’, as if as soon as we ‘give in’ to these primordial urges we become something ‘lesser’. Psh, I’d rather associate myself with pigs and hippos than with humans, any day.